Gianficaro: Pro-choice? Pro-life? How about pro-common sense?

Friday

Alabama might be better served focusing on improving its pathetic public schools and health care systems and economy rather than chipping away at Roe v. Wade, the law of the land.

Facebook can often be a glut of mundane and/or self-aggrandizing nonsense, a town square where folks post personal events they believe others may not have seen or hope to see. Be honest, how many of us would make it through the day without knowing someone ate a burger for lunch or completed a four-mile run? None would argue these are not extraordinary events and feats to be shared with the world. Forget the unredacted Mueller Report; I need to know more about lunch. Was the burger cooked medium or well? Ketchup or plain? A side of fries? No Coke? Pepsi? Tell me. Tell me!

Then there is the flip side. Facebook posts that strike a chord, posts that nail it. Posts that leave you nodding, posts that make too much sense, if that’s even possible. Posts like the one shared by a friend I grew up with and who’s a nurse at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

Hers was a common sense slap at the recent passage of anti-abortion laws in several states, all initial steps toward a clear challenge to Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court ruling legalizing abortion.

“So, let me get this right. I’m not allowed to get an abortion because I didn’t realize I was pregnant till six weeks. … Cut funding to Planned Parenthood so now I can no longer get the cheap birth control to prevent a pregnancy (not all insurance covers birth control). (Once-proposed) cuts to funding to CHIP, WIC, and food assistance, making it harder for single mothers to take care of the child they were forced to have.

“I think I’ve got it. Government can’t tell you what guns you can own because that’s violating your rights as an American citizen. But it’s totally OK for them to tell me what I can and can’t do with my own body. Cause my rights aren’t being violated? Or because my rights as a woman just aren’t as important?”

Not everyone agrees with my nurse friend, millions of other pro-choice advocates, and me. A Quakertown woman called to scold me for my recent column condemning Alabama’s new anti-abortion law, which does not penalize women who have an abortion, but which calls for the imprisonment, up to life, of physicians who perform them.

“You’ll have to answer to God for approving of murder,” Jennie Lee Grasso said. “And so will the doctors who carry out the murder of the unborn. They should go to jail for life.”

I asked Grasso if she'd have the same heels-dug-in opinion if her son was that doctor who performed an abortion on, for example, on a poor 16-year-old impregnated though incest.

“If you are against capital punishment because we as humans have no right to willfully end those criminals’ lives,” she wrote, “then how can you be pro-choice and think abortion is (OK), and that it's permissible to take the life of an innocent human being who as yet can not speak for themselves?”

I’m pro-capital punishment, so ...

Speaking of hypocrisy: Alabama ranks dead last in the US in public education, 46th in health care, and 45th in economy and crimes and corrections. It is tied for fourth-worst place in infant mortality, with a rate of 7.4 deaths per 1,000 live births. It is not difficult to connect the dots between abortion restrictions — the state has only three abortion clinics remaining — and infant health problems, as limits to legal abortions can prompt women to choose unsafe alternatives. Yet here is Alabama's state legislature — ruling the headlines, whittling away at Roe with the most restrictive anti-abortion law in the nation, the fourth state to do so this year — posturing about caring for children? Please.

A second friend posted this on Facebook:

“Just because I am pro-choice does not mean I am pro-abortion. It means I understand your choice is none of my (expletive) business, and I will always fight for your right to choose.”

This was followed by a post from a person I don’t know:

“How will you abortion supporters deal with all that heat in Hell?”

Sometimes, a picture of a burger doesn’t sound so bad.

Columnist Phil Gianficaro can be reached at 215-345-3078, pgianficaro@theintell.com, and @philgianficaro on Twitter.

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